Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I am not expert in unix shell scripting but able to write simple one. So please help me to implement following functionality.

There are two directories :
1) /home/guptar/wrk
2) /home/guptar/arc

I need to write a script "arch.sh" which would be executing every 10 minutes through cron. If in last ten minutes there is file reached in wrk directory then script will send a mail and will copy that file to arc folder.

File name convention is prn<counter>.txt.

I know that mtime or ctime can be used but not sure how can I do this?

Kindly help me with the solution.

Thanks in advance.

Sounds a lot like homework. What have you tried so far?

Below is the command to find the files which are 10 minutes old:

Code:

find /home/guptar/wrk/prn* -mmin +5

But unable to use this with if condition. Please guide me.

I think it should be -mmin -10 to get list of files created in the last 10 minutes. You can do something like below:-

Code:

if [ `find /home/guptar/wrk -mmin -10 | wc -l` -ne 0 ]
then
      for file in `find /home/guptar/wrk -mmin -10`
      do
         cp $file /home/guptar/arc/
      done
fi

Why are you willing to deal with than 10 min constraint ?

Can't you just tell your script to archive all the prn<counter>.txt files ?

Since your script will be scheduled every 10 minutes in the crontab it will just pickup those files that have meanwhile been created (since the last run).

If you are afraid to harvest a file that is currently being updated you can pick up all but not the last one (or all but not the "n" last, just adapt the tail or head number to skip).

Below, some examples to skip the last one.

Code:

ls -t1 | egrep -e 'prn[0-9]+.txt' | tail -n +2 | while read f
do mv "$f" "/my_arch/$f"
done

or ... if you want to process them in the same order they were created (and if your head version does support the negative value of -n option):

Code:

ls -rt | egrep -e 'prn[0-9]+.txt' | head -n -1 | while read f
do mv "$f" "/my_arch/$f"
done

of course this can be enhanced (adapt with you own path, make a copy instead of a move, check the status of the copy or perform some checksum operation before deleting the original file etc ...)